Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. The prophetic words of abolitionist, writer, and social reformer Frederick Douglass live on in his speeches and books of autobiography. This speech, delivered on July 5, 1852 was an address to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass grew up enslaved and deprived of rights and liberty and argued that the American values of freedom and liberty for some, but not all, was an injustice to all humans.